Communicating in Clever Ways With Chevron VP and CHRO Rhonda Morris

In this episode of Redefining Work, I sit down with Chevron Vice President and Chief HR Officer Rhonda Morris. Rhonda and I discuss her nonlinear path in HR, how she’s built a global people strategy and how she communicates in clever ways with the workforce.

Chevron is a global, U.S.-based energy corporation specializing in oil and gas. The company has been around for 143 years and now operates in 55 countries with about 40,000 employees worldwide. Rhonda started her career in HR at Chevron and has worked there for 30 years.

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Coming Up From the Ranks in HR

Rhonda wasn’t recruited by Chevron out of business school. She’d long known about the company, as her grandfather worked for Exxon and spoke highly of Chevron. 

But her school, Boston University, wasn’t targeted by Chevron for its new-graduate recruiting program. So, Rhonda wrote multiple letters to the company explaining why she was a good fit. The campaign worked, and she started in Chevron’s HR development program in 1991. 

Chevron rotated people to a new assignment every two years. Across four assignments, most of Rhonda’s early years were in the downstream business — “that's our manufacturing, our retail service stations, our marketing, et cetera.”

After five years with Chevron, Rhonda worked for Häagen-Dazs, then owned by Pillsbury, before boomeranging back to Chevron in 1998, where she remains to this day. But she hasn’t spent the past 25 years only in HR.

“I'm one of those people who likes to fill gray space and I've always worked on any leadership team I've been on — anything that would help the objectives of the organization, whether it was HR-related or not,” Rhonda says. This led her to spend seven years in the European fuel business, first as a marketing director, then as general manager, and finally as vice president. That mix of HR, marketing and business gives Rhonda a unique perspective on Chevron.

“Because of this complex relationship that you reference between our centers of expertise and our business, I actually understood how it worked,” she says. “Spending that much time in a CPO role and marketing role has really helped me do this job differently.”

Building A Global HR, People and Talent Strategy

Chevron is a global company, and Rhonda decided that HR shouldn’t be running everything from the U.S., especially with 50% of the workforce based internationally. The global people strategy Chevron’s developed is based on three key areas: changing technology, expanded employee flexibility and changing employee expectations. 

To meet those three demands, Rhonda’s focused Chevron on a four-part people strategy. First is maintaining Chevron’s employment model, where people tend to make their careers at the company .Second is skill-building and upskilling. Third is increasing diversity in leadership. Fourth is encouraging a positive culture. 

Chevron’s people strategy also requires leaders to work on at least one assignment outside their home country. This helps them gain perspective so they can manage projects across 55 countries of operation. 

Another way Chevron has changed its people strategy is through technology. The company went from 88 learning and development programs to one: Workday. 

“It is absolutely shocking — in a good way — of what people are actually doing on their own without a program, without required training,” Rhonda says. Employees are taking the initiative to learn on their own.

Finding New Ways To Communicate Internally

During the pandemic, Rhonda and Chevron felt that internal communication had become repetitive and stagnant. To solve this problem, Rhonda created an internal TV show called “Business Casual.” 

“My communications advisor and I were talking about, ‘what can we do that's different?’” She explains. “Then we came up with this idea of having an internal television show that has a studio audience of employees, and it has guests who are employees.”

Rhonda also started using Chevron’s internal social media platform not just to give work updates, but to also talk personally and candidly about her life during the early pandemic. 

“I had a daughter in high school who was remote learning. I had my mother 10 miles away who was sheltered in place in her house, and I wouldn't let her go outside, even before California put the shelter in place, mandates in,” Rhonda writes. 

She’s writing fewer of those weekly notes these days, but in a throwback to her letter-writing campaign in 1991, “if you write to me this year, hand-write a letter to me, I will write you back,” she says. “And I want to know three things. One, how you're doing. Two, what are you excited about? And three, what are you doing to recharge?”

People in This Episode

Rhonda Morris: LinkedIn